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Poetry Quotes by Rita Dove
- The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something
- There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is…
- By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we…
- Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
- I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
- I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
- I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
- Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to…
- Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get…
- Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're…
- If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at…
More Poetry Quotes
- Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. — Aristotle
- Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals,… — Aristotle
- I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come… — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets.… — Paul Auster
- If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. — M H Abrams
- Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. — Matthew Arnold
- I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. — John Ashbery
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases… — Margaret Atwood
- The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is… — Margaret Atwood
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden